I’m very pleased, thrilled, delighted and generally chuffed to announce that The Wrong Messiah has been shortlisted for Ultimate Christian Library Book 2012.
If you enjoyed the book, please add your vote, by voting here.
As a bonus, all votes get a free CRE pass.
I promise to use the power wisely.
This is a series I’ve been sporadically tweeting. This, for all aspiring writers, is what you need to know:
The writer who made millions by self-publishing onlineA couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.
via The writer who made millions by self-publishing online | Books | The Guardian.
An interesting article, which draws on the Vancouver Human Rights lecture,by Ethan Zuckerman Cute Cats and The Arab Spring,
Zuckermans argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other popular social services arent good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.First, because when YouTube is taken off your nations internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.
via The internet is the best place for dissent to start | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
I really enjoyed, Scorsese’s Hugo. One of the few 3D films which are genuinely worth paying to see in 3D. And in part that’s because the film is a celebration of a film-maker who loved experimental effects and techniques: Georges Melies. Here are some tasters of his work for those who haven’t come across him:
And a brief biography by David Robinson.
Four plant species, the images of which are found on the Shroud, indicate the geographical origin of the Shroud. Fresh stems of the plants Gundelia tournefortii, Zygophyllum dumosum, Cistus creticus and Capparis aegyptia could be placed on the dead Mans body only in a strip of land, a few kilometers wide between Jerusalem and Hebron. Nine blooming species found on good photographs of the Shroud share blooming months of March and April, thus indicating that the event of covering the man with the plants in the Shroud took place during that time of the year.
via The Botany of Bible Lands: An Interview with Prof. Avinoam Danin – Boing Boing.
I am ambivalent about the Shroud of Turin, but this is fascinating evidence at least for the provenance of the cloth.
It’s all about our old friend the sermon. How to improve it, how to survive it, and how to do without it.
You can find out more about the book (and buy copies) at the website: www.43rdpoint.org
In the fulness of time there will be more links there, background resources, maybe even some of the enormous history of preaching that I wrote when I was supposed to be just contributing a brief overview.
Oh, and you can also download the intro.
The ideal stocking filler for the preacher in your life.
Spent the last week in France, teaching at Le Pas Opton – one of my favourite weeks of the year.
A lot of the time was spent talking about the early church and the way in which they sought to put Jesus’ teaching into action.
The following comes from the Epistle to Diognetus, an anonymous work, probably from around 150 AD. I’ve used it in several talks, because nothing describes better the world of the first Christians, and the way in which so much of what they did ran counter to society around them, and, indeed, was a threat to the world around them. It’s an amazingly inspirational piece of writing.
‘For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice and eccentric way of life. This teaching of theirs has not been discovered by the thought and reflection of ingenious people, nor do they promote any human doctrine as some do. But while they live in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.
They marry like everyone else, and have children, but they do not expose their offspring. They share their food but not their wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh. They live on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws; indeed in their private lives they transcend the laws.
They love everyone, and by everyone they are persecuted. They are unknown, yet they are condemned; they are put to death, yet they are brought to life. They are poor, yet they make many rich; they are in need of everything, yet they abound in everything. They are dishonoured, they are glorified in their dishonour; they are slandered, yet they are vindicated. They are cursed, yet they bless; they are insulted, yet they offer respect. When they do good, they are punished as evildoers; when they are punished they rejoice as though brought to life. By the Jews they are assaulted as foreigners, and by the Greeks they are persecuted, yet those who hate them are unable to give a reason for their hostility.
In a word, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.’
Epistle to Diognetus 5.1-6.1
Taken from Michael Holmes’ translation in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations
On my way back from speaking at a conference yesterday I had a chance to go and visit Bunhill Fields in London, the old, non-conformist graveyard just north of Moorgate. Step off the busy City Road, and the place has an eerie quiet and beauty.
In the centre there is the tomb of Bunyan, and opposite it a memorial to Daniel Defoe and the tombstone of William Blake. Blake’s tombstone doesn’t, in fact, mark his grave, which is unmarked and is some twenty metres away, by a tree. (For a detailed description of how to locate the bit of grass above Blake, go here.)
There are other famous people buried in the cemetery as well, although, sadly, the pathway gates are locked and I couldn’t get in. (Well I could, but there were too many people about to risk nipping over the top.) Susannah Wesley, John’s mum, is buried here. As is Isaac Watts, and the mathematician and minister Thomas Bayes.
Indeed, the whole area is awash with non-conformity and dissension. On the opposite side of City Road is John Wesley’s house and the Wesley Chapel. But if you head west, through the cemetery and across the little street that borders it on the west, you come to the Quaker gardens, formerly the burial plot of the Society of Friends in London. George Fox is buried somewhere here along with, as the plaque tells you, ‘some ninety other martyr friends who died in London prisons’. It is difficult now to conceive of the Quakers being a persecuted minority, but they were – as were many other non-conformist and dissenting groups. Bunyan spent much of his life in prison.
I thought of some words from the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress, which always seemed beautiful to me: ‘When the time was come for them to depart, they went up to the brink of the river. The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell, night; welcome, day! His daughter went through the river singing, but none could understand what she said.’
Bunhill Fields is a quiet, tranquil place now. All those restless spirits – free thinkers, dissenters, radicals, visionaries – they’ve crossed the river and, one day, will sing new songs.
This week I have been rediscovering my inner geek. I have installed the awesome Dragon Dictate and started to learn how to pour all my information into DevonThink.
The latter first. It’s basically a huge database, into which you can chuck anything that comes your way – pdfs, pictures, text files, web pages, docs. You can then tag items and catagorise them into folders. But the programme can also look for links between the items. For the first time I feel like the mass of data on my hard drive is actually beginning to get organised. It’s already fixed itself as the first step of my workflow: shove data and anything that interests me into DevonThink, shape it and develop it in Tinderbox, and then write it all in the glory that is Scrivener.
Or don’t write it. Speak it. Because my other big discovery this week is Dragon Dictate. It costs a chunk of money, but it’s worth it. It’s a dictation programme: you talk and it types and – here’s the killer – it is really, really accurate. Of course there’s a learning curve – there are lots of special commands you can learn, and teaching it to type ‘Achaia’ has been challenging – but I’ve been really impressed with the extent of the vocabulary and the power of the programme. It’s not good for every type of writing, of course. For the stuff involving a lot of footnotes, for the real detail work, you probably want a keyboard. But for the broad brush stuff, the narrative or the semi-coherent rants which seem to fill my writing more and more, it’s brilliant. And what’s interesting is that when you ‘talk’ a book, rather than think it and then type it, it sets you off in all kinds of directions. I have always been someone who likes to think out loud, to think as I speak and discuss. (some would say I should think a little bit before I speak, but that would spoil the surprise.) So in my writing this week, as I’ve learned to relax into this speaking process, it’s gone in some unexpected directions in which it’s gone! I’ve always prepared talks by wandering around the office or another room just improvising and then shaping, editing and structuring afterwards. It will be really interesting to see how the same process affects my writing. Of course, it also helps that I write in a fairly conversational, informal way.
The other cool thing is that you can issue global commands to your computer as well. So you sit there telling your computer to do things, feeling like somone from a sci-fi movie. I still haven’t really mastered this thing yet, but when it works it’s awesome.
Of course, the downside of this is that I end up standing in an office, looking like someone from a call centre and speaking to myself. Perhaps the next version will speak back. You know, maybe they could add a feature where it will respond to my typing with helpful, encouraging phrases such as ‘wow Nick, that’s really interesting’ and ‘it’s a thrill listening to you’ and, ‘pay no attention to that critic, they just don’t understand genius.’ or something like that.
Just a thought.